Friday, February 07, 2014
Google To Show Privacy Fail Message On Its Search Page

Google's has failed to overturn a court ruling requiring it publicise being fined for breaches of the French data protection act.

On 3 January 2014, France's data protection watchdog CNIL issued a decision against Google for infringing several provisions of the French Data Protection Act. CNIL had objected to Google's method of combining data collected on individual users across services such as YouTube, Gmail and social network Google+. CNIL consequently ordered the search giant to pay an administrative fine of €150.000 and to publish a notice referring to its decision on its French homepage www.google.fr.

Google is appealing the fine, and last month requested the partial suspension of CNIL's decision. Specifically, Google asked the court to suspend the publication order, as putting such a notice on its homepage would cause damage to its reputation.

However, the judge of the French High Administrative Court (Conseil d'Etat) rejected Google's request in a preliminary ruling handed down on 7 February 2014.

As a result, Google must publish a notice for a period of 48 hours in accordance with the modalities set by CNIL.

In addition, Conseil d'Etat judge said that Google also has the option of alerting its users to the fact it disagreed with the CNIL ruling when publishing the notice on its homepage.

This decision does not prejudice the final claim against the decision that is still pending in the Conseil d'Etat.

Spain, Britain, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have also opened similar cases against Google, arguing that its privacy policy breached local rules protecting consumers on how their personal data is processed and stored.

Update:Below you see the notice Google has posted on Saturday on its French homepage :